The Slavic element in Homer's epics

The Makrygiannis memoirs is considered a masterpiece of demotic literature. George Seferis (1963 nobel prize for Literature: "for his eminent lyrical writing, inspired by a deep feeling for the Hellenic world of culture.") http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1963/press.html

http://www.indopedia.org/Old_European_Script.html

The Vinča markings have not attracted as much linguistic attention as recognized but undeciphered scripts such as Crete's Linear A and Easter Island's Rongorongo. However, the Vinča material has still managed to stir some controversies of its own.

The primary advocate of the idea that the markings represent writing, and the person who coined the name "Old European Script", was Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994), an important 20th century archaeologist and premier advocate of the notion that the Kurgan culture of Central Asia was an early Indo-European culture. Later in life she turned her attention to the reconstruction of a hypothetical pre-Indo-European Old European culture, which she thought spanned most of Europe. She observed that neolithic European iconography was predominately female — a trend also visible in the inscribed figurines of the Vinča culture — and concluded the existence of a matriarchal culture that worshipped a universal Mother Goddess. She also incorporated the Vinča markings into her model of Old Europe, claiming them to be the writing system for a hypothetical Old European language. Most archaeologists and linguists disagree with Gimbutas' interpretation of the Vinča signs as a script: it is all but universally accepted among scholars that the Sumerian cuneiform script is in fact the earliest form of writing.

An altogether odder controversy concerns the theories of Dr. Radivoje Pešić from Belgrade. In his book The Vinča Alphabet, he proposes that all of the symbols exist in the Etruscan alphabet, and conversely, that all Etruscan letters are found among Vinča signs. However, these claims are not taken seriously by scholars, who demonstrate that the Etruscan alphabet is derived from the West Greek Alphabet, which in turn is derived from the Phoenician writing system. This is however not completely incompatible with Pešić's views as he claims that Phoenician writing system descended from Vinčan. Pešić's critics have claimed that his support for the continuity theory, which claims a Slavic presence in the Balkans far earlier than the usually accepted date, is motivated by a nationalistic agenda; hence, for instance, his claim that the poet Homer must have spoken a Slavonic dialect (Pešić, 1989).

Hellenism - FACT or FICTION

It is well known that the ancient Greeks were the oldest civilization in the world; that they were the "cradle of democracy"; that they conquered Asia with Alexander the Great, and imposed their culture to the rest of the world; that they wrote the Bible and spread Christianity, and founded Byzantium; and moreover, that they gave the Slavic world their literacy, and thus deserve as special status in the global community as a "holy" nation!

In this essay I am going to expose the incorrect reading of the history of Greece, since it is a misconception that developed only in the recent times, ever since the nation building processes started shaping the modern societies of Europe.

Apparently prior to the French revolution, and as Albert Kahn's photos reveal, even after it, most of the population of Europe was ethnically diverse and originating from various ethnic groups that have survived a series of reigns in the past, which were (most of the time) exploratory to the common people, and new systems were at the brink of expansion, that would allow more liberties to the people in general! These liberties in time turned out to be a very cunning way of manipulating huge portions of the European population, within national framework, to drive a consuming society forward! The Kings of the past got replaced with the governments of the present and the corporations that sponsor them!

The nation building processes started as a natural result of the Industrial revolution, since it was necessary for the industrialists to create consuming societies that would have the right to a free choice of the products offered at the free market, as opposed to the totalitarian societies ruled and governed by autocrats such as the monarchs or the church!

The new corporations that started developing in the modern era needed the people to choose what they wanted to buy, and to have the capacity to buy it, therefore the human rights movements, and the libertarian approach! If the industrialists and the corporations had relied on autocratic mediators to sell their goods, then the profits would have been limited and the development of the free markets a fiction! Therefore, in order to create the free market, free people were supposed to be created, thus the nation building processes were put in action! This created nations that desired conformity and material commodities that would derive from the industrial progress and at the same time determine the development of consumerism, depending on the needs and requirements of the various consumers! This on the other hand, created marketing as a form of persuasion of the consumers what was best for their comfortable lives, and thus psychology took a major role in determining what was to be sold, and how!!! But let us not go there!

Our purpose is to shed light on the processes that shaped Europe in the last centuries, say the 19th and the 20th which was the time when most of the nations in Europe got its full exposure, based on common roots of courses, however, applying various criteria! When the processes reached the Balkans, these criteria changed drastically in the process of shaping the nations of the region, to suit the strategic interests of the Great Powers, or those nations who have already managed to create ground for the development of "free markets" within their societies, and needed expansion to survive! The Balkans was way behind in this regards, say in the 19th century! It still is!!!

Now, in this regard, the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) was the major obstacle to the new economical powers that needed expansion, and even though within Europe there were discrepancies between the old and new capitalistic societies, which resulted in the two World Wars to settle things straight, Turkey was a common enemy to all sides. So all the eyes of Europe turned to the Ottoman Empire!

Now, to the freedom fighters of the European societies, who were mostly literary workers, such as Lord Byron and many other Philhellenes, the vision of "democracy", which resulted from the rediscovery of the "ancient Greek values" during the Renaissance, represented the driving force behind all libertarian movements in the west. This suited the policy of the Great Powers, moreover, it suited the corporations that sponsored the governments of the western countries, and the vision of "democracy" represented the main reason why Greece became the primal point of interest to tackle with the Ottoman Empire!

Apparently, the "cradle of modern democracy" was suffering slavery and humiliation by a non-European race, such was the Ottoman, and this had raised all the sympathies of the European intellectuals, that later helped Greece gain its independence and create its modern nation from the "departed worth" of what has remained from the ancients, so cherished in the minds and literary works of the westerners!

People like Byron visited Greece during its Ottoman slavery, and their reports affected the European societies to a great extent, that they decided to take actions against the Ottomans and liberate the "cradle of their democratic dreams", which later turned into a nightmare for the region, since it was misconceptions, not truths, that shaped the European visions, and it was consumerism, not human liberties, that was the driving force behind the matter.

Let me clarify!

"Byron had first visited Greece while still a Cambridge undergraduate and had witnessed the “sad relic” of a great civilization now under the “long, accustomed bondage” of the Ottoman Empire. He was saddened by what he viewed as the Greeks’ passive acceptance of their bondage. With prophetic foresight, Childe Harold stirs the docile Greeks to action. Thirteen years later, in 1821, the Greek Revolt against the Turks began, the very first shots ringing in Byron’s ears as a call to arms.

Now in his mid-thirties, he was seduced by the idea of liberating the ancient nation that was the very cradle of the civilization that had nurtured him. He would lead the “scattered children forth;” he would “resume the gallant spirit” of the Spartan warriors of Thermopylae; he would call Greece “from the tomb.” In July 1823, he sailed to Greece to perform the short fifth act of his drama.

It soon became clear to Byron why the Greek Revolt had gotten off to such a pitiful start. The unflattering reports he’d heard about military incompetence and the lack of a coherent nationalist ideology were, alas, well founded.

Driven like a proverbial Spartan, Byron worked tirelessly to instill military discipline and to inspire patriotic fervor, both with some degree of success. His status as a National Hero of modern Greece is well earned..."

http://www.richardnathan.com/walk/byron.html

This gradually led to the Greek War of Independence and the creation of the modern Greek nation on the ashes of the population that barely spoke Greek, and was more Asiatic than European, when Byron first came to tell them who they were!!!

"The Greek War of Independence (1821–1829), also commonly known as the Greek Revolution (Greek: Ελληνική Επανάσταση Elliniki Epanastasi; Ottoman Turkish: يونان عصياني Yunan İsyanı), was a successful war waged by the Greeks to win independence for Greece from the Ottoman Empire.

After a long and bloody struggle, and with the aid of the Great Powers, independence was finally granted by the Treaty of Constantinople in July 1832. The Greeks were thus the first of the Ottoman Empire's subject peoples to secure recognition as an independent sovereign power."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_War_of_Independence

This is the moment of the idiocy, which was instilled by the deluded European minds with a lack of knowledge for the reality of the matters in the Balkans, which caused a series of atrocities and conflicts that are still not resolved even in modern times, and damaged most of the nations in the Balkans as a direct result of the policies driven by the demands of the Great Powers and their industrial consumerism!

This is what General Makriyannis, said in his Memoirs, regarding the Independence of Greece:

"Today the fatherland is reborn, that for so long was lost and extinguished. Today are raised from the dead the fighters, political, religious, as well as military, for our King has come, that we begat with the power of God. Praised be your most virtuous name, omnipotent and most merciful Lord. ”

Now, an interesting notion is that the King in Greece was also an import from the west.

"The Kingdom of Greece (Greek: Βασίλειον τῆς Ἑλλάδος, Vasíleion tīs Elládos) was a state established in 1832 in the Convention of London by the Great Powers (the United Kingdom, France and the Russian Empire)."

"At the London Conference of 1832, Great Britain, France and Russia (the Great Powers at the time) offered the Greek throne to the 17-year-old Bavarian Prince Otto of the ruling House of Wittelsbach, who became the first King of Greece."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Greece

Now, the aftermath of this fiasco was the following:

"The consequences of the Greek revolution were somewhat ambiguous in the immediate aftermath. An independent Greek state had been established, but with Britain, Russia and France claiming a major role in Greek politics, an imported Barvarian dynast as ruler, and a mercenary army.[28] The country had been ravaged by ten years of fighting, was full of displaced refugees and empty Turkish estates, necessitating a series of land reforms over several decades.[3]

The new state also contained 800,000 people, fewer than one third of the two and a half million Greek inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire and for much of the next century the Greek state was to seek the liberation of the “unredeemed” Greeks of the Ottoman Empire, in accordance with the Megale Idea, the goal of uniting all Greeks in one country."

"The newly established Greek state would become a springboard for further expansion, and over the course of a century Macedonia, Crete, Epirus, the Aegean and other parts of Greece would throw off the Turkish yoke and unite with the new Greek state."

Now, being aware of the western romantic dream, which created their nation as the "cradle of modern democracy", the modern Greeks made up of mixed ethnic groups, started spreading their Megale Idea, in strengthening their national identity thus creating a coherent body for further territorial expansion, and consequently domination in the region! Again this was done in negotiation with the interests of the Great Powers in the region, regarding the Big Game!

Thus, the Greek intellectuals started reviving the ancient values, to that extent that they introduced a new form of a Greek language, known as Katharevousa to clean the otherwise Turkish Greek and approximate it to the language of the ancients, which was doomed to be a total failure.

It was this time when the modern Greeks started learning about the ancient times, from the western scholars of the 19th century and developed a propaganda, abusing historical records about all those ethnic groups who populated the territory of Greece in the past, to which they attached the term "Greek" or "Hellenic", a practice that even today shapes the policy of the modern "democratic" state of Greece.

I use "democratic" in parenthesis, because even in the ancient times and today it is a misunderstood concept that needs to be clarified.

In the ancient times, Greeks developed democracy as the rule of the demos, the privileged citizens of the city-states, excluding the slaves, and women in most of the parts! Greek democracy was pretty much discriminatory in the past as it is today, and some of the concepts of human rights that we recognize as democratic values today, such as minority rights and gender equity, were and still are unknown to the Greek mind!

Greeks of modern age have been an ethnocentric nation basing its policy on "the supremacy of their race", that has always brought them closer to the radical rightists, rather than the moderate democratic options of the modern multicultural societies!

Hellenism has become the common agenda for all the supporters of the Megale Idea, a practice that is still undermining the democratic processes of the country!

This Megale Idea encompasses the falsifying of history to which the term "Greek" or "Hellenic" got attached to everything that preceded the modern nation's existence, based not on ETHNIC grounds, but purely LINGUISTIC!

This relies on the fact that the Hellenic script and language, more or less, has been used by many peoples before the modern Greeks were created, as a civilizational language, or better say Lingua Franca for most of the Mediterranean cultures, ever since the classical times!

Today, archeology points at yet new moments in the study of the demography of the Balkans, including the origins of cultures, languages and ethnic groups!

For example, there are many words in Homer's work that share similar roots with some Slavic words, as used in modern Slavic languages! There is the recent discovery with the Demotic text from the Rosetta stone, that reveals a proto-Slavic language in use by the ancient Macedonians, even evidence that the Mycenaean and Minoan civilizations were more closely related to the ancient Macedonians, rather than those we call modern Greeks, and were linguistically closer to the Slavic substratum! Moreover, the archaeological evidence, as presented in the study by Florin Curta, The Making of the Slavs, reveals the fact that the Slavic migrations was an inventions of Byzantine writers, and a theory abused by the policy makers of the past era!

In this light, the Hellenistic approach to all these areas of scientific research sounds rather ridiculous, particularly when we take into consideration that the modern Greek nation was created from the "departed worth" of the various ethnic remains from the Byzantine era, very much distant from the ancient people who used the Hellenic script and the various dialects such as the Attic, Doric, Ionic, or later on Alexandrian, as a language of commerce, and a Lingua Franca among the various ethnic tribes.

Just observe how idiotic some theories sound in the light of the knowledge that the 19th century scholars had about demography, ethnography, linguistics and economics!

"During the Archaic period, the population of Greece GREW BEYOND the capacity of its limited arable land (according to one estimate, the population of Ancient Greece increased by a factor larger than TEN during the period from 800 BC to 400 BC, increasing from a population of 800,000 to a total estimated population of 10 to 13 million)."

Now I wonder, if a population can increase TEN times in a period of 400 years, than Greece must have been a BREEDING ground for RABBITS! Isn't it more logical to say that the populations from other regions adopted the Greek script and language, while they preserved their ethnically diverse character!

A comparison: if some archaeologists of the future say, in 3400 AD, dig out evidence that would prove that the English language spread dramatically from only a patch of land in Europe, say England, to America and then to the rest of the world, in a time span of merely 500 years, say from 1492 to 2008, should we assume that the English population "GREW BEYOND the capacity of its limited arable land" and by the 21st century all the globe was populated by English?!?!?! Absurd to the bone, isn't it!?!


"From about 750 BC the Greeks began 250 years of expansion, settling colonies in all directions. To the east, the Aegean coast of Asia Minor was colonized first, followed by Cyprus and the coasts of Thrace, the Sea of Marmara and south coast of the Black Sea. Eventually Greek colonization reached as far north-east as present day Ukraine and Russia (Taganrog). To the west the coasts of Illyria, Sicily and Southern Italy were settled, followed by Southern France, Corsica, and even northeastern Spain. Greek colonies were also founded in Egypt and Libya. Modern Syracuse, Naples, Marseille and Istanbul had their beginnings as the Greek colonies Syracusae (Συρακούσαι), Neapolis (Νεάπολις), Massalia (Μασσαλία) and Byzantion (Βυζάντιον). These colonies played an important role in the spread of Greek influence throughout Europe, and also aided in the establishment of long-distance trading networks between the Greek city-states, boosting the economy of ancient Greece."

It is not a mistake to assume that these were people who used the Greek script and language, or better say dialects of Attic, Doric, or even used the script with their own language, but to claim that the population of Greece GREW and FLOODED the ancient world is merely as stupid as to say that all of us today are ENGLISH, simply because we use their language!

This brings us to a conclusion that the language we call "Greek" today, must have been considered as a civilizational language in the ancient times, without any particular belonging to a single nation! The nation building processes started much later, in the modern era, and the newly created Greek nation simply adopted, or better say confiscated the heritage of the Mediterranean world from the ancient times, thus taking the Lingua Franca of the past, as the national language for the modern Greek nation, which is ethnically so diverse, that if they acknowledge the minorities within its state, there wouldn't be a Greek citizen in Greece whatsoever!

Greece is facing a major change in mentality and we all need to be very patient! Since it is going to influence its national identity and its core principles of existing as a single body! This would gradually affect the economy of the state, and the national coherence as provided by Byron would perish into history! However, evolution would set off in a right direction for many young Greeks! And that is a positive outcome of the whole matter!!!